Teachable Features 2: Pricking and Ruling, MS. e Musaeo 54

Sian Witherden explains the ruling in MS. e Musaeo 54. Sian is in the second year of a DPhil in English, at Balliol College, Oxford.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. e Musaeo 54 is a parchment manuscript dating from the first quarter of the fifteenth century, which contains a version of Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe. The text itself occupies folios 1r–29v. The last few folios are mostly blank, save for a handful of names signed in later hands (fol. 30v) and a diagram of a hand, the fingers of which are labelled with the names of musical notes (fol. 31v). Of these final pages, folio 30r is a particularly useful teaching resource because it contains a ruling pattern that has not been filled with lines of text. In the absence of any such text, the organisational structure and function of the ruling pattern becomes especially clear:

The ruling in this particular example, which has been completed in dry-point, has a relatively simply pattern. It consists of thirty-four horizontal rulings and two bounding lines, one each in the right and left margins. Some manuscripts, for example those containing saints’ days or astrological data, demand much more complex ruling patterns in the form of grids and tables. Other manuscripts, however, use just frame ruling, or sometimes, no ruling at all. On the spectrum of complexity for ruling patterns, therefore, this folio falls somewhere in the middle. This photograph gives a closer look at the bounding line in the right- hand margin:

E Musaeo 54 is further useful as a teaching resource because the pricking marks used to coordinate the rulings are often visible in the right-hand margin. In many medieval manuscripts these prickings have been lost because the pages were trimmed for the original binding, or because the pages were (re)trimmed for later bindings. MS. e Musaeo 54, by contrast, offers a good insight into the process of pricking and ruling the page, a task that may have been completed by the scribe himself or a separate individual. The prickings can be seen particularly well in the following photograph:

Thomson, Rodney M., ‘Technology of Production of the Manuscript Book: Parchment and Paper, Ruling and Ink’, in Nigel Morgan and Rodney M. Thomson, eds, TheCambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 2: 1100–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 75–84.